The person at the piano, openly reproved thus before her friend, lifted her uninspired hands from the keys and spake. When she had finished she rose.
"But you can't leave now," the megaphone man argued. "Right in the rush hour."
"I'm gone," said the girl. The fat man looked about, helplessly. He gazed at the abandoned piano, as though it must go on of its own accord. Then at the crowd. "Where's Miss Schwimmer?" he demanded of a clerk.
"Out to lunch."
Terry pushed her way to the edge of the counter and leaned over. "I can play for you," she said.
The man looked at her. "Sight?"
"Yes."
"Come on."
Terry went around to the other side of the counter, took off her hat and coat, rubbed her hands together briskly, sat down and began to play. The crowd edged closer.
It is a curious study, this noonday crowd that gathers to sate its music-hunger on the scraps vouchsafed it by Bernie Gottschalk's Music House. Loose-lipped, slope-shouldered young men with bad complexions and slender hands. Girls whose clothes are an unconscious satire on present-day fashions. On their faces, as they listen to the music, is a look of peace and dreaming. They stand about, smiling a wistful half smile. It is much the same expression that steals over the face of a smoker who has lighted his after-dinner cigar, or of a drug victim who is being lulled by his opiate. The music seems to satisfy a something within them. Faces dull, eyes lustreless, they listen in a sort of trance.